~Fairytales are written dreams~*

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

I really need to update my posts more often. Then again, my resolutions almost never work. I suppose with the lack of audience, there is also a lack of motivation to write anything. I think I'm starting to emphatise with all the fanfic authors online when they're asking for reviews. Perhaps I should make an effort to leave a review for all the stories that I've read.

I've dug out a list of 1001 books to read in your lifetime. I downloaded it as per my grandma's instruction a couple of years ago, but it's been sitting in my cabinet collecting dust all these while. Anyway, I went through the list, and to my dismay I found that I've only read about 22 books. So I came to a decision: I shall make it my goal in life to finish the entire list. After all, everyone need an impossible goal in life, don't they?

To start on the journey of fulfilling my goal, I found a couple of books in my home (which I had never read) and started to regain my habit of reading books, just like how it was before I had discovered fanfiction. Oh, I still read fanfics, of course. It's nearly impossible to stop now, but as long as it doesn't interfere with my studies, oh well. Getting back to the topic, thus far this year, I've read Things Fall Apart, Lord of the Flies, Hard Times and Surfacing. I'm currently halfway through Cry, the Beloved Country. The funny thing is, none of these books are actually cheery or optimistic. In fact, the first three are, quite frankly, vaguely disturbing. Especially Surfacing. Cry, the Beloved Country has a more central theme, I guess, as do Things Fall Apart. Both are about how the Western culture clash with the indigenous in the developing worlds. At least for the former we can have the consolation that South Africa is a much better place now. Hard Times has quite a clear theme, too, which is only natural considering it's a satire, mocking how the materialistic society and an education centred on nothing but hard facts is eroding the more important aspects of human life. My favourite quote is when the ex-school master asked his student, 'Have you a heart?' and the student replied with, 'Yes sir, I do, it's an organ (starts defining what a heart is).' Talk about irony.

Lord of the Flies, meanwhile, is different, and the themes actually make me rather uncomfortable. I'm the kind of person who would prefer to believe that the human nature is fundamentally good, but LotF really contradicts it. A group of boys, removed from society's views of right and wrong, descends into savage madness, bloodthirsty and uncivilised. Does this mean that we're only moral because the society that we have been born to and live in would condemn us if we were not? Our sense of right and wrong - is it innate, or is it instilled within us by society? If no one is watching, if we can know for certain that we would not have to suffer any consequences, would we behave in a similar manner as well? I don't think I will. My beliefs are too deeply ingrained within me. But that brings me to a even more difficult question. What then, makes society right? We've often read stories where individuals would do the 'right' thing and stand up against society for their beliefs, but we only think that society in the past is wrong because society today is different. It's only logical, yes, that morality is a man-made concept. And yet, to think that something so fundamental within our society, something on which the entire society is based, something which determines how society functions - to think that it is so subjective - it's a scary thought. Because then, the only thing we have to justify our actions would be because the majority says so. The next thing you know, you are faced with the question, why should the majority be right?

On the island in LotF, the group of savage boys are the majority. When we're told not to do something, we'll ask, 'Why?'. The answer would always be, 'Because it's not right.' But these boys, still so young and ignorant, almost untouched by society's ingrained beliefs, go deeper than we are generally comfortable with. They ask again, 'Why?' And this time, we find that we can give no answer. Then again, the very word civilised probably means that once we're away from civilisation, we're not civilised anymore. I've always wondered why lust is one of the seven sins, but the lust for power - for anything, really - is really dangerous, if this book is any indication.

Surfacing is another matter once again. In fact, until now, I still have no clear idea what the book is really about. Oh, I understood the plot perfectly well, of course, but the ideas and themes are another matter entirely. A woman and her relationships - with her boyfriend, her ex, her so-called friends, her parents, and her aborted child, which later links to nature. The entire story revolves around her search of her father who disappeared, but it seems more like a spiritual exploration, mostly revolving around her guilt towards the abortion and drives her to explore the complex relationship humans have with nature. What struck me most about the book is actually the way it shows how thin the line between human beings and the other animal is. That is, of course, assuming that there is even a line in the first place. For, really, what makes us so different?

the dreams exposed ;